sky's the limit

Sky’t the limit / La città che incanta

Layers of metal combined with vivid colours create infinite skyscrapers. This is a world of soaring vertical leaps and meticulous geometries that dialogue with each other in an urban lexicon. Sky’s the Limit is the new exhibition by Marcella Chirico, a versatile artist who is capable of shaping various materials to give form to her personal imagination, in which her fascination with daring metropolitan architecture co-exists with the fear that it really only represents a prison for modern humanity. Today more than ever we live alongside the shameless artificiality of our urban centres: there is always more traffic, more cement and more noise, until we can no longer see anything beyond the boxes we close our lives into every day. There are large and solid boxes, houses, offices, supermarkets: and there are smaller ones, always frenetically moving, automobiles.

The artist reveals the authentic soul of New York, examined in its various aspects. Modern, captivating and violently colourful, but at the same time conformist and depersonalising. A place that is not a place, where humans challenge their limits by creating architecture in which the only obstacle appears to be the sky itself, but these same buildings seen from below only amplify a sense of human finiteness, we are impotent in the face of so much superabundance.

Marcella Chirico documents all of this pungently, through her research and the meticulous use of an assemblage of materials, and including painstaking techniques such as the stitches she makes with metal threads derived from fragments of metal plates. Although the geometries are pervasive, they are never based on reality, the city is utopian; the skyscrapers’ ascents towards the sky are powerful and soar vertically, but never in straight lines, instead they are abstract and fragmented. Her works describe a world that is chaotic and deranged, in which the dialogue between the metropolis and man is demonstrated in all of its fragility.

curated by
Federica Dell’Oca
June 2017